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Mr. INGERSOLL, 



THE JEHOVAH OF THE JEWS. 



-BY 



SAMUEL BENLISA. 



Printed at the Union Job Rooms, 
Jacksonville, Fla. 



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-OR- 



Mr. INGERSOLL, 



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THE JEHOVAH OF THE JEWS. 



-BY- 



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SAMUEL BEN LISA, 



Printed at the Union Job Rooms, 
Jacksonville, Fla. 



Right of Translation Reserved. 
Copyright 1884, by 
samuel be1tlisa 



1M THAT I MTV 



OR 

I 

MR. R. L \ T^LL, TT?TT ^" T ' ^ - ^HE JEWS 

BY S. BENLISA. 



"But thou art holy. O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel." Psalms 
xxii— 3. 

"And the Lord said unto him, Who hath made man's mouth ? or the dumb, or the 
deaf, or the seeing, or the blind ? have not -I, the Lord ? " Exodus, iv.— 11. 

" Thou, even thou, art Lord alone ; thou hast made heaven, the heaven of heavens 
with all their host, the earth, and all things that are therein, and thou preservest them 
all ; and the host of heaven worshippeth thee." Nehemiah ix. — 6. 

We quote the above opening passages from scripture to remind 
Mr. Ingersoll and his readers, that the Jehovah of the Jews whom he 
writes of so sarcastically and flippantly, is the God of Nature ; and 
we ask that it be remembered that there is not a shadow of cant in 
Israel; however much tLere may be among some who profess to follow 



the religions based on the Bible, and some infidels who torture them- 
selves into a forced mechanical, incongruous rhetoric, while en- 
gaged in a wordy contest against the God of Israel, the God of the 
Universe; a contest that would be entirely amusing, if there were not 
a most solemn and awful aspect to it. 

We look up at the heavens, consider the boundless space and the 
innumerable celestial bodies moving through the azure, and as the mind 
reverts to the power that holds them in their places, we bow in utter 
awe and reverence to the incomprehensible God of Israel. I am far 
from having a desire to write a sermon, although I am constrained to 
confess that I find it impossible to approach the Bible, and attempt to 
write about it, without declaring unconditional allegiance at the start' 
to the grand central presentation of its revelation to God, the creative 
energy, immanent in, touching nature, the universe, in inscrutable mode* 
cognizable by man to a degree, dependent on his intellectual and mor- 
al capacity and power to grasp this idea of the great fact of facts : God ! 

I purpose to record a few of the thoughts suggested by the two 
articles from the pen of the gentleman named, recently published in 
the North American Revirw. These effusions have just been handed to 
me by a friend for perusal, with the request to -write something for 
publication. I shall briefly advert to some of the statements or prop- 
ositions contained in the articles referred to, which will enable those 
who have not had the opportunity of reading them to better understand 
the controversy, and position taken by a man with a large following. 
A position, that when fairly viewed, will be found to be as untenable 
and weak, as it is revolting and dangerous ; perhaps not so dangerous, 
taking in account that aspect of grotesque ridiculousness that pre- 
sumptuous ignorance always manifests. To condense a few of the 
leading noiions of the author, deduced from the context of the compo- 
sitions under consideration, we will put them in the following form, and 
nearly in the writer's words, merely as we said, for the benefit of those 
who have not read them ; while those who have, need no further in- 
formation on the subiect. 

" Jehovah is cruel, changeable, wicked, and altogether mistaken. 
Christ was mistaken, and in his teaching there lies coiled a deadly 
venom. The Bible, apart from a few good and noble sentiments which 
it shares in common with the Koran and Zend Avesta, Cicero and 



5 



Epictetus, is a record of blunders and crimes, altogether a hindrance 
and barrier to the progress and civilization of mankind. The justice 
of God is not visible in the history cf the world." 

These, and a thousand and one sequential distortions, outre, and 
baseless statements of a similar sort, constitute a querulous, illiterate 
and pitiful attack and shocking criticism on God Almighty, on nature, 
on the inspired leaders of Israel and teachers of mankind, on Christ, 
on the Bible, on the Book ! * 

Considering the many mistakes of this distinguished and popular 
writer and orator, all susceptible of clear demonstration as such, hi s 
obvious defective mental training and glaringly illogical cast of 
mind, his palpable lack of culture, involving an almost culpable 
ignorance of facts on the part of one who writes and speaks in the role 
of a teacher; to notice all his mistakes in detail, it would be necessary 
to write quite an extensive book, designed for his especial instruction, 
and to meet his manifold requirements ; an exhausting task that I 
confess little taste for, and which I should dread to have imposed on 
me. I will permit myself to say that I too, am a descendant of that 
great Syrian who founded the glorious and saving faith of Israel, and 
taking a hand in a free tilt in the republic of letters, it should not 
be surprising that, feeling a just and natural indignation, I should at* 
tempt to parry in a human way, an impious, insensate and ignorant 
thrust at the shield of the " Jehovah of the Jews," at that inattack- 
able shield that no lance ever reaches, but under which, poor, vain 
creatures with a little breath are allowed to contend. But, aslsaid ? 
this opponent of the " Jehovah of the Jews " has a large following 
composed perhaps of a part of a not over thoughtful throng, in and 
out of those numerous assemblies that gather in churches and syna- 
> gogues, but who are perhaps, too close to the shrine of Mammon to 

quite take in the true nature of their attitude, and the spirit of the 
religion of the Bible. 

Between the bold, unscholarly, reckless, and, to put it mildly, I 
think, wofully mistaken arraigner and impeacher of the Holy, Ineffa- 
ble Name, and his followers, and the half-hearted, half-doubting, indif- 
ferent, insincere, engrossed, because unawakened, lapsed masses, it is 
easy to see, and it would be folly to deny, that the Bible is not over- 
whelmingly appreciated or fitly revered. For Mr. Ingersoll, it is a 



6 

collection of ridiculous productions, having nothing in them, except 
perhaps, a few commonplace sentiments pleasing to the ear; which his 
majestic understanding pronounces to be good. But perhaps there are 
difficulties in the way of a thorough or correct apprehension of the 
sacred scriptures, difficulties of a nature that Mr Ingersoll distinctly 
states that he objects to, but which may, nevertheless, owe their exist- 
ence to unchangeable, irreversible law, that will not step down and out 
at his b'ehest ; the least of them not being the one that the Book itself 
points out frequently, viz : the difficulty of acquiring that spiritual 
merit, that goodness, which builds a mental receptivity adequate to the 
comprehension of the Truth, 01 of that part of the vast, sublime truth 
which is for humanity ; for man exercising self control, exercising the 
prerogative of selecting and willing the good, (i. e. the things that are 
not ignorance, darkness, suffering, sorrow, death,) a prerogative which 
emphatically proclaims him not altogether an automaton, a fact of his 
constitution corroborated by t^e best scientific workers and thinkers of 
the day, and one of the basic facts of the religion of the Bible. If not 
altogether free, not altogether slave. Commands to do or not to do are 
neither given nor evolved by and would fall with no force on automa- 
tons. " It is for the physiologist to assert and "uphold the doctrine of 
the oneness, the accountability and the immortality of the soul, and the 
great truth that as there is but one God, in the universe, so there is but 
one spirit in man." — Drcqiers Physiology, p. 24. 

The Bible insists that the human being must find within his myste- 
rious subjectivity a monitor that points to the love of good, and discov- 
ering the immensity of the infinite system of which he is a part, seek 
the Great Spirit.; must worship it in spirit and in truth, must have 
faith in its greatness, and courting it in reverence and awe is then 
lifted to the position of an humble co-worker with his God, and is 
rewarded with light, faith and hope. 

Let us endeavor to present a few of those aspects of the inspired 
record that confront and respond to all the puerile objections raised 
against it, as the bist mode of supplying the information needed by 
those wh >se attacks are founded on demonstrable misconceptions of the 
Book on whose pages there burns a Divine fire, a book that bears a 
light that wise men have called a peculiar light, for want of a better 



1 

word : that Book of Books in more senses than one : the repository of 
the divinest literature to my mind, but sought to be contemned, derided 
and reviled by an infallible (?) apostle of an anarchic infidelity and 
darkness. But, how futile must all attempts prove that would belittle 
the faith in righteousness, in goodness, in the highest, in the beauti- 
ful, the sublime, the immortal! Keynotes of the religion of the 
Bible. Better far to call all the inhabitants of the earth to 
attend to that law recorded in the Bible, which Moses said was 
written in the heart of every human being, the law of righteous- 
ness, of humanity, of harmony and love universal, which is the funda- 
mental and central proposition and thought of all the scriptures, and 
which properly understood, would answer all objections to the punish- 
ment and extermination of that subverting wickedness destructive to 
the race, which is found in the history of the world, in the hist >ry of 
Israel, and which some people object to and cry out, devil ! in total 
and awful ignorance of the meaning of the very word, and of the ter- 
rible import and nature of the evil and of those offences that come 
from man. Let us not hesitate to quote the Book on which so much 
depends, and which is so little understood, and so unjustly assailed by 
some " For this commandment which I command thee this day, it is 
not hidden from thee, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that 
thou shouldst say, Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring it unto 
us, that we may hear it and do it ? But the word is very nigh unto 
thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayst do it. See, I have 
set before ihee this day, life and good, and death and evil.'' — Deuteron- 
omy, xxx. 11, 12, 13, 14 and 14. 

What a revelation yen have here ! What a magnificent ''natural 
basis for ethics.!" Develop this by tests and experiments in your ed- 
ucational processes ; it is the education ; here you have the beginning 
of the "Hebrew truth." This was said by Moses to Israel after he had 
announced the decalogue, Jehovah's covenant with mankind (a reflex 
of the law in their nature) and after he had announced the law, or 
moral and social code, full of toleration and a tender justice, in accord 
ivith truth, designed to incorporate the decalogue, or law and principles 
of Tightness, holiness, or exact relations of human nature to Jehovah 

the all, in the always serious germinal circumstances that spring out of 
and environ the daily life. 



8 



This Code, with the penalties objected to by Mr. Ingersoll, was the 
best mode that could possibly be devised, as must be conceded by all 
knowing human nature, as all right thinking men know it, of calling a 
people of their age, condition and mission, as subsequent history has 
full} r demonstrated, to the spirit and principles of the decalogue ; let us 
fear not to repeat it, which was the reflex of the Divine or chief law, 
written in their hearts, a point or fact in connection with the whole sub- 
ject of the Biblical revelation that cannot be too much insisted on, and 
which, becomes an infallible guide to those who are perplexed in their 
search for a thorough mastery of Biblical truth. This Divine law, the 
religion of Israel, teaches, to depart from, is to create and merit evil, 
unhappiness sorrow and death. This view of the subject it seems ought 
to enable one to understand the difference between the Divine covenant 
(the decalogue) and those laws and ordinances, regulations and stat- 
utes, rendered necessary by the nature of things, and designed, in con- 
formity with man's constitution, as a mode of application to enkindle 
and keep alive the principle of holiness, exactitude in conduct, with 
reference to love, to righteousness, and calculated to lead him gradually 
and fittingly to the apprehension and performance of those high duties 
resulting in, and tending to the reacquirement of that holy innocence of 
evil or human wrong equivalent to human perfection. Innocence, Holi- 
ness and Perfection ! potential qualities written under the name of the 
Ineffable, the Holy One of Israel between the wings of the flaming 
Cherubim. It is here that man appropriating and possessing these 
qualities, is brought close to the living oracles of Jehovah. May it not 
be here that the righteous man, doing the will of his Father in Heaven 
enters into Heaven ? It is here that Israel's leaders sought and found 
their inspiration. Reflections on Biblical facts like these ought to 
enable any fair minded and impartial enquirer to ascertain what the 
real nature of the -Bible is : what inspiration is: (that inspiration which 
cannot be weighed or measured, the nature of which cannot be put in 
the precic-e language of a logical or legal proposition) and show in con- 
nection with other facts within the common experience and reason of 
mankind (such facts as the tending to misery of the things indicated as 
wrong or evil) how demonstrable and verifiable, how proper, is the 
"rock bottom " basis of the Book's Divine Idea that goodness, human 



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goodness, and holiness, are protected and rewarded with happiness, 
with life, with sound, sane, joyful, vigorous life of an imperishable 
nature. 

What a contrast is there between Israel's truths for mankind and 
the unfounded intimations and gross, ill-formed, deadening views of the 
author of the articles referred to, and other cognate sciolistic litera- 
ture ! 

What is the Bible? Let us continue in our endeavor in this 
necessarily circumscribed space, to present a few of the aspects of the. 
Book assailed, as the best rejoinder, to all those who, it seems to me, 
are so grossly mistaken % iu their apprehension of it, and ignorant 
hostility to it. 

The two covers that enclose the old and new testaments, enclose 
a collection of different books, produced at different periods of time by 
different individuals, under varying circumstances, with the finger of 
Deity on all indirectly, but more directly on some. Jt is immaterial, 
so far as the issues sprung upon the public mind by Mr. [ngersoll are 
concerned, what manuscripts, purporting to be originals, or copies of 
some of the books of the New Testament, he may have had access to. 
The two covers of the Bible now enclose sufficient matter to reveal 
the Divine or chief idea to mankind aireadv alluded to in part, which is 
the principal end and aim of the whole work as it now stands. " Not a 
sparrow falls to the ground," unmarked by the God of Nature; and to 
the scholar mid man of culture, and to him with the light of faith and 
goodness in his heart, the different values of the different books of the Bi- 
blenre easily recognized and felt; as it is with all the booksin the world, 
outside of the pens of the gifted Jewish scribes, who had to record " the 
words that breathe," "the thoughts that burn," the facts that men 
need to know so sadly, emanating from the Divine Intelligence All 
books have a value, some more, some less, and some very little or none 
at all, the hitter permitted to exist sometimes, as if to manifest how far 
from the light, perversion and ignorance may stray, concealing though 
it may be, the harmony of discord not understood." And so, there 
is a very large Bible outside our Divine B >ok, secondary to it, confirm- 
ing it always. All literatures in fact and by comparison point to it 
and establish it as the pre-eminent, most excellent, perfect revelation 



10 



from Jehovah, the God of Hature, through human intelligence to 
mankind, of man's nature, duties and interests. No man of 
culture though, need be told this. Ah I Israel's page is a Divine 
evolution clothed in the garb of words. What then is the Bible? 
The pith, the core, the essence, the fundamental Divine or Chief 
Idea disclosed on its pages, thai is- the Bible the thing in which 
mankind to-day are solemnly interested, and which will manifest 
itself again and again while we write. The Book is a beautiful 
symphony of harmonious ideas representing Truth, and some day per- 
haps in the history of the race; on its march to the time " when the 
heavens shall pass away as a scroll," when human ears shall be better 
attuned, some gifted one will touch the chords, and evoking the 
tones that are now lost to the " civilized living" human souls, will 
be lifted to the glory and happiness that He who inhabiteth the 
praises of Israel Jehovah I has in store for his sons. 

It is incontestible that the truth of the whole basic idea of the 
Book is independent of proof from the very nature of things; is also 
independent of the necessarily difficult deaionstratibility of the 
truth of such occurrences secondary and incidental, having a pri- 
mary meaning and importance, for the people who witnessed them, or 
livedjiear their report, as the Burning Bush, the thunders and light- 
nings of Sinai, the Brazen Serpent, the division of the waters of the 
Red Sea and of Jordan, the cloud by day and fire by night, and some 
of the extraordinary incidents connected with some of the Prophets and 
Seers ; the circumstances recorded as attending the birth and resurrec- 
tion of the Divine Hebrew man of God and son of man, Jesus ; he who 
looked upon the welfare and interests of humanity as he would on 
those of an earthly father, while doing his highest duty, as he con- 
ceived it, to the Creator Jehovah his father, the Father of all in heaven 

7 T 

as the Bible says. 

A talented English writer much inclined to Hebraism, calls this 
sjroup of non natural or extraordinary circumstances, " the embarrass- 
ments " of the Bible. But are they really so ? The? cover a great deal 
of ground, it is true, and trend upon those subjects belonging to those in. 
visible potencies that touch the many but rarely and too delicately to be 
easily explicable and verifiable. How much of what is called the mys- 



II 



ticism of the Bible may not owe its origin to the mist that escapes from 
ignorance enveloping and obscuring the things it cannot altogether un- 
derstand ? Let us remember that for us it is the idea designed to be con- 
veyed by these accompanying extraneous incidents that is actuallv and 
ever important, and which bears its own proof with it, when it is 
brought under the light of human reason, that human reason, when it 
<is reason that has always a ray of the Divine reason in it. It must also 
be borne in mind that each incident of the kind, each miracle, has a 
history and exegesis of its own. 

I quote the following verse with its Talmudical exegesis to 
throw out a clew showing how some of the things of the Bible, that 
taizen literally do «ot always present an immediate and pertinent sig- 
nification, but which deprived of their allegorical enswathement pre- 
sent profound and demonstrable verities. — Numbers xxi, 9. 

"And Moses made a serpent of brass and put it on a pole, and it 
pame to pass that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld 
the serpent of brass he lived." 

Says the Talmud, "Dost think a serpent killeth or giveth life? 
But as long as Israel are looking upwards to their Father which is in 
Heaven they will live, if not they will die. And the word serpent, 
philologically considered, affords a flood of light in this connection. 

"Miracles are considered by the Talmud much as Leibnitz 
regards all the movements of every limb of our body, as only 
possible through a sort of pre-established harmony, i. e. the 
course of creation was not disturbed by them, but they were all 
primarily existing, preordained. They were created at the end of all 
other things, in the gloaming of the sixth day. " God," says the Tal- 
mud, " made it a condition upon the sea when he created it, to open 
of itself before the Israelites ; the fire, to leave the three martyrs un- 
scathed, etc. The healing of a sick person is often a greater miracle 
than that which happened to the men in tbe pit. Those that have been 
saved from flagrant sin may consider that a miracle has happened to 
them." And to take a lower view of most of these circumstances, are 
they nor. the frames to the pictures, in most instances? May not some 
be the merely necessary and effective literary forms to carry the noblest 
and most sublime conceptions closer to the imbruted and, consequently 



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unreceptive minds of alienated, sensual, stolid, dull, indifferent men, 
through that admitted weak and ineffectual, approximate medium, that 
medium not always intimately related to the higher forms of human 
thought — human language ? Now if we consider how much of the 
communications from the Divine intelligence to the leaders of Israel 
came in the form of natural reasoning processes ; imagination, genius, 
the natural incidents of dreams of highly preoccupied intellects, visions, 
extatic and esthetic, exalted spiritual individual conditions, evidences of 
ail of which abound in the Bible, it will be found that the bulk of the 
Biblical revelation has its source and origin in known and natural and 
sometimes ordinary processes of the human intellect. The intellect! 
that intellect which the highest living scientific authorities are announc- 
ing and demonstrating to be altogether, or to a large degree, an agent as 
external to the principal organ of the mind, the brain, as light is to 
the eye, vibrating air or sound to the ear. We would ask, can Mr. 
Ingersoll, or any body else, tell how much nearer under certain 
circumstances this partly or wholly external principle may be 
to the "Lord thy God " of -the Bible, the Jehovah of the Jews, the 
Great Spirit, the invisible power? Also, can anv one tell or explain 
what connection or exact relation there may be or exists between the 
potential virtue and goodness of the individual and that external agent 
or intellect principle that receives, communicates and reveals the will 
of the Most High to man ? 

These suggestions and intimations are quite pertinent and relevant 
in endeavoring to get at the precise nature and mode of the Biblical 
inspiration with the view of not separating it too far from human com- 
prehension, and presenting something like an ascertainable basis for 
what some people endeavor to mystify so as to throw out vague doubts 
at that which could scarcely, even in an approximate form, come within 
the scope of their experience, if modesty, faith in Jehovah, in God's 
greatness constitute some of the necessary requirements for attaining 
unto it. " In thoughts- from the visions of* the night; when deep 
sleep falleth upon men." — Job. iv. 13. 

Again, electricity and magnetism, specialists say, are to the under- 
standing of the day but little known or apprehended ; well, who can 
tell what are the gradations and relations of such invisible potencies as 



18 



these to the intellect, and between all these, and the great spiritual, 
Master of Nature, the Jehovah of the Jews. ? 

• Why may not this Master at special times in the long history of the 
race manipulate these invisible potencies at his own will and pleasure, 
and produce what are now called embarrasments, and which are received 
by some with doubt, and treated by others in a spirit of poor, shal- 
low criticism ? 

Again, why may not individuals sometimes in accord with 
the Divine Intelligence, courting it, as intermediate intercessors, lovers 
of man, of nature and nature's God, receive emanations from it which 
on their passage to human intellect, akin to the Persian fire from 
heaven; the concentrated rays of light from the sun, sometimes 
strike the bush near by that burns, and produce other nou natural man- 
ifestations. Do not be too incredulous about the peculiar things that 
happened under peculiar circumstances to the people on whom a pecu- 
liar light shone. 

In this connection one is reminded of Shakespeare's Horatio. " Do 
you not think there are many more things in heaven and earth than 
are dreamed of in your philosophy?"' 

After all, the most arrogant and conceited of mortals must 
concede the truth of the proposition of the " limitation of human fac- 
ulties," and the consequent relativity of human knowledge, which is 
simply the repetition or reaffirmation of a great truth stated by Moses 
in Deuteronomy, xxix, 29. " The secret things belong unto the Lord 
our God : but those things which are revealed belong to us, and to our 
children forever, that we may do all the words of this law." Ah, what 
after all is this law but the revealing of God's angel of intelligence to 
man who has missed the right, departed from the small voice 
which Moses says is in his heart. While, as we have said, the 
Divine Idea of the Book, or the " Hebrew Truth," as the erudite Reuch* 
lin called it, needs no demonstration nor explanation, and is positively 
independent of proof of any extraneous incident or circumstance, in any 
shape or form, but recommends and declares its nature to human rea- 
son ; that ennobling and man-constituting gift so little appreciated and 
so little cultivated, especially by a thankless people inflated with the 
gains of a peaceful commerce; and a relative progressive and secure 



14 



civilization that owes so much, aH the good it has, to Israel's message 
for the nations, we cannot help giving a little play to the imagination 
to meet an unreasoning, doll, abortive rhetoric which forces words into 
positions that make them seem awry, and as if they were mourning 
their lost meanings, and the jumbling service they had been called to 
render. 

Let us return to the Bible. The first mention or notice of sin as 
separation from the highest, from the law of the heart, occurs in 
the history of the temptation and fall. A history, an emblematic 
and symbolic conception, profound and comprehensive, that contains 
the whole Bible, the whole Divine Idea. The discovery of sin or sep- 
aration from the highest, the best for all, as such, is first revealed here. 
Geikie says that no other nation has or presents this idea. No other 
book records it. In the first chapter of Genesis we find the idea of 
God, thus giving a spiritual origin to creation, and the idea of siii, 
establishing the fact, that man is not an automaton, but that he pos- 
sesses in a just and eminent degree and measure, the faculty to act 
righteously or unrighteously, or in other words, the subjective capacity 
to attain the fearlessness, the calm, the spiritual repose that brings the 
increasing wisdom which renders facile the attainment of joys and 
knowledges and powers unspeakable. 

The remainder of the Bible is the natural corollary, the logical 
outcome, of the apprehension, utilization and application of these two 
profound conceptions of basic facts; one, the recognition of the 
mysterious power, Jehovah, the other, sin, or separation from 
Jehovah, contrary to innocence, contrary to an harmonious subjective 
relation and accord with that Infinite Creator and Helper. The whole 
Bible is but the unfolding and evolution of the Divine Idea of the 
nature, origin, destiny and proper conduct of life. 

On what historic page do you find this reasonable, comprehensive 
presentation of this truth that is for man? This truth which may be 
called the skeleton, the foundation, the frame work of the Bible, its 
pith, its core, its essence; God — love, inclination to God, love to 
man, the establishment of the bond of love between man and man, 
the principle of humanity based on an everlasting and unchangeable 



15 



interdependence of man upon man, and on Jehovah's mercy, the 
proper conduct of life based on a creative righteousness; life ; earthly 
happiness, happiness eternal. 

Can any one find these conceptions, such a system, recorded in the 
pages of any other booii? I challenge the united shcolarship of the 
world to find them. Not the mere dabblers in literature. What may be 
found is a liberal sentiment here and therefrom an individual with no 
following, certainly not a national one, and what would not be difficult — 
I say it without the slightest hesitancy — would be to trace the Bible, the 
Israelite, as the source of all that is admirable in regard to morality, 
enthusiasm for humanity, toleration, catholicity, love, and the uphold- 
ing of righteousness, while the existence of ever so little light from an 
isolated individual of a post Biblical age, that could not be directly 
traced to the Book, would not disprove its Divinity and pre-eminent ex- 
cellence, hut would prove that there were minds in all nations, in all 
ages, not entirely shut out from the light of the Divine angel or influ- 
ence of intelligence, of the God of the Jews, the Creator ; individuals 
enjoying to a certain degree, the qualities of an intellect in love, and 
in accord with its awfully great mysterious God, who Jesus says is love. 

In availing ourselves of this manner of response we feel, though 
we may be mistaken, that we are furnishing some of the exact kind of 
information, sadly needed by those who treat the Bible in the pitiful 
fashion of the author of the articles in question. Now let us suggest 
that the decalogue and the code, of laws deduced therefrom is more 
Divine than the books comprising the history of Israel, a history that 
has a great value and important lessons for mankind : a history which, 
full of individual and national crimes and blunders, is an exemplar 
of the struggle to be righteous, a struggle that was co inspire and initi- 
ate an universal struggle for the right, for happiness, which was to 
evolve that fusion of the races, that hnmanization, that solidarity of 
mankind, destined to precede, perhaps unthought of, non-natural, 
spiritual developments, inhering in eternal time. Divine are the 
teachings of the Hebrew Prophets. There is salvation indeed for the 
human race in their sublime ideal and interpretation of the Tightness 
that leads to human happiness. A glorious Heaven on Earth is by 
them foreshadowed as the fruition of righteousness when the Wolf 



16 



and the Lamb shall dwell together in a blissful stage of life earthly; 
from which, that incarnate Intelligence and goodness, Jesus, more 
emphatically reaffirms an eternal state of happiness is to be evolved : 
an idea running through the Divine revelation, but which Israel had 
lost sight of, and which to-day is almost dead, or grasped by only afew„ 

Regarding the Books of the Biblecontaining the history of Israel 
as a record merely, of the acts of a people who lived and sinned and 
suffered in the gross, actors in the great drama of humanity, who were 
to illustrate to the nations the truth of the great fact, that righteous- 
ness, i„ e„ not missing the highest, alone leads to happiness, i. e. the 
thing that is opposed to pain, sorrow T , inhumanity, suffering, 
we rest our presentation here, of what the Bible really is, as quite 
adequate to our present purpose. 

We cannot do better in this necessarily limited space, but must 
insist that there is not a single circumstance recorded in the Bible 
which did not make towards the condemnation and eradication of evil 
or unrighteousness, and say again, without fear of sane or cultured 
contradiction from any quarter, that the light alone > good, happiness^ 
joy, are the key notes, the objects of the spirit, the teachings of the 
Divine Book, that chief revelation from the Jehovah of the Jews the 
great Helper to man, which men to-day call the Bible, and of which 
the Talmud says : " Turn to it again and again. Turn to it, for 
everything is in it." The Talmud! the exegetical contemporary of 
the Book, the work of the rarest and most masterly dialecticians, the 
Doctors of the Law, who had " thinkers," and used them with such 
marvelous and admirable skill. The two refraius that run through 
the history of the Kings of Israel, with slight variation are these, 
"And he did that which was right in the sight of the Lord." "And 
he sought God in the days of Zachariah, who had understanding in 
the visions of God : and as long as he sought the Lord, God made him 
to prosper." II Chronicles, xxvi, 4 and 5. 

Of Amon it is said, as of many another King and bramble in 

Israel : "And he did evil in the sight of the Lord ;" and he ended 
violently. 

This Book it seems to me defends itself. But perhaps it may be 
necessary to possess the sanity that means the capacity to concentrate 
the mind, to carry several ideas that go to make up a whole conception 



17 



or plan, to be able to recall, to be able to reproduce all the facts, 
ideas and thoughts, that bear on a subject, qualities that probably help 
wonderfully in the effort to apprehend rightly the Book which is a 
reflex of the original writing, in the being, and which is an evolution, 
designed to aid man to read his nature aright, and wield his dominion 
with the almost miraculous effects Israel points out. "But the just 
shall live by faith." — HabaJchuh. 

While I think I have already presented the arguments that meet 
the objections to the penalties of the Mosaic code, showing the differ- 
ence between the divine covenant, (the Decalogue that speaks not of 
punishments) and the code designed to keep it alive, I think it fair to 
state that tradition " the tenor of the Mishna or oral law, or civil 
code, clearly and frequently demonstrate that the severer penalties 
were never inflicted — were always modified from time immemorial. 
It was an adage among the Rabbis, "Have a care in legal decisions. 
Send forth many disciples and make a fence around the law:" and 
another, "On three things stand the world, on law, on worship, 
on charity." It would be w 7 ell to bear in mind that there were supple- 
mentary laws, oral, dating as far back as a time not far from the des- 
ert, among the people, laws acounted of Divine origin, which modified 
considerably the enactments of the Pentateuch; this oral law tradition 
attributed to Moses himself, for this purpose. We quote from the 
Talmud. "Compute the earthly loss sustained by the fu filment of a 
law, by the heavenly reward derived through it. He who doe* not 
ston short at the gate of justice, but proceeds within the line of mercy, 
in him the spirit of the wise has pleasure." Many such adages, max- 
ims of law, precedents, abound in the laws of the Talmud, showing the 
spirit that was looking more to the intention in the fulfilmsnt of a 
precept than to the fulfilment of the letter, of the written law " Bear- 
ing in mind the origin of those unwritten laws, supplementary to the 
Pentateuch, how natural is the hypothesisin accord with the minds of 
the masters of the law, that when Moses entrusted to the seventy Elders 
or Judges, supervision of the affairs of the tribes, he told them that the 
law or death for idolatry and Sabbath breaking was on the record to 
show the danger that would arise from its violation ; a danger that rep- 
resented death in the moral sense of the highest That they must be 



18 



guided by the mercy of Jehovah, which prevails and is uppermost 
in the covenant and the written laws ; and taking into considera- 
tion the weakness of man, not inflict those two penalties, except 
under extraordinary circumstances. It is recorded in the begin- 
ning of the Talmud, two thousand years ago, that a court that passed 
sentence of death once in seven, or even seventy years, for any cause,, 
was called the court of murderers. We quote from a distinguished 
scholar in regard to Talmudical interpretation and application of the 
laws of the Pentateuch. " There is an almost modern liberality of view 
regarding the fulfilment of the law itself, expressed by such frequent 
adages as : The scripture says he shall live by them, that means, he 
shall not die through them. They shall not. be made pitfalls or bur- 
dens to him, that shall make him hate life. He who carries out 
these precepts to the full is declared to be nothing less than a saint. 
The law has been given to men, and not to angels." 

Thus the tempering influence of the oral law, or civil code, con- 
fronts justice with mercy; and is the quality of justice by itself, not 
merciful, in that it takes man's nature in account, and warns him of 
and defends him from the rigid " consequences of his acts." ? 

But let us even defend the letter of the law for the sake of the 
strength and wisdom it holds. We shall advert to the death penalty 
for the violation of the Sabbath and for Idolatry, penalties that Mr. 
Ingersoll parades as illustrating the cruelty and injustice of the mer- 
ciful Jehovah of the Jews. 

What is the Sabbath ? It was the basic institute that was de- 
signed to keep constantly before the mind, the great fact and miracle 
of cseation ; It was the commemoration, ever recurring, of the recog- 
nition of the existence of one God, the Creator of the Universe ; it was 
to consecrate Israel's worship of the God of Nature as their God, in 
contradistinction to the idolatry and destructive, baneful, revolting and 
degrading practices of the heathen. Moses taught them that their God 
had by certain special acts, in which inhered the laws of developement 
and evolution, produced creation, as we know it, and that He then 
rested. It was to remind them of their rescue from Egyptian 
bondage, and of all the extraordinary incidents occurring under 
their eyes, illustrating the Divine intervention in their behalf. And, 



19 



seizing the idea of rest, of the rest until the resurrection it may be ; the 
transformation of the scenes we know into a new Heaven and a new 
Earth, he gave to this cardinal institute of the religion of a people who 
were to be a nation of Priests, a holy people destined to leaven all the 
nations of the earth with the Divine Idea, fire, inspiration, that lives 
in the language of Scripture in the "names of" parable, allegory, 
enigma, speech, sentence, light, command, vision, prophecy," which the 
Talmud says, are the names of the Holy Ghost in scripture, and which 
was to call the nations back to the law in their hearts, to that fear of 
God " that must eome from man" and that cannot be given by God, to 
immortality, to happiness. 

I say also, he gave a highly important economic value to the Sab- 
bath, when he commanded absolute physical rest for man and beast ; 
rest from the ordinary work and engrossing avocations of every day, 
with its important hygenic effects, opportunity for prayer, thought, cul- 
ture and association. 

There is such a potency for good in the idea of the Sabbath, that 
all of the comparatively civilized nations, thousands upon thousands of 
years after its promulgation strictly, and with demonstrable beneficial 
political and general good effects, obey this command. 

Let any one consider all this from the point of humanity univer- 
sal and reflect on the natural stolidity and imperviousness to vast and 
comprehensive ideas of a people, just fresh from a debasing slavery of 
a-make- brick-without-straw type, suffering from the demoralizing influ- 
ences of a pronounced unintellectual environment ; and reflect too, on 
the profound importance to the whole human family that the Divine 
Idea of the religion of Israel, should ever be preserved, and all fair 
minded, right thinking people will and must admit, in view of the bar- 
barous religions and philosophies, the religion of Israel has taken the 
place of under modified forms, and which is destined yet to unite the 
world under its Truth, that it was better that one member, under 
these circumstances, should be cut off, than that the whole body 
should perish. Than that the Religion of the Divine Idea should be 
weakened. 

The subject of the Sabbath as a powerful factor in the develop- 
ment of modem civilization, liberty, and all that is best in modern life. 



20 



cannot incontestably be overrated ; it is a subject susceptible of almost 
infinite amplification. Reference to the history of Europe would show 
that the political liberty vaunted and admired so much by Mr. Inger- 
soll, owes a great deal to Israel's Sabbath. When an individual slight- 
ed or violated the conditions that constituted the precise observance 
and recognition of this institute, he broke, belittled and ignored the 
sacred bond and sign of the religion of Israel, that was to uproot 
murder, and the sacrificing of children to Moloch, and the sacrificing 
of human beings generally, and, as a matter of fact, to eradicate and 
destroy wickedness and evil, and all the ills of humanity. 

You hang a man for killing a man to-day, and the gallows you 
raise, when in accord with the justice and mercy of Moses and Christ, 
is society's protest against man subverting crime. What would you do 
to him, who, influenced by the tenderness of a code which insisted on, 
and made possible by its institutions, the loving or inclining to one's 
neighbor and fellow man as to one's self, lifted his hand against man 
and humanity ; agaiust God, in weakening the religion that was to be 
and is, in spite of an unfortunate and unenlightened misapprehen- 
sion, the salvation of mankind ? 

Mr. I. deplores the ills of humanity in a mechanical and studied 
rhetoric, a deploration that originates in and finds a market supplied 
by the very religion he attempts to ridicule. Can he not see the arm 
of the God of creatures not altogether automatic, striking for mankind, 
in the ordinance of the death penalty, at that particular time, for a 
violation of the Sabbath, and all that it signified and still signifies ? 
What does he know of death, which he apparently regards as the 
greatest punishment, though he belittles Jehovah, the author of life, 
his master? Or, does he know all of death and the invisible magician 
behind the spirit that goes from a body that dies ? Let us give the 
Bible the benefit of all of its ideas. It is as a whole, that it is a 
perfect and most excellent chief or Divine revelation. 

The Rabbis declare that the commandments speak not of death 
or punishment, but that Moses, a man inspired and instructed by his 
nearness to the angel of intelligence, or influence of the Divine spirit* 
attached detergent penalties and punishments to violations of laws, regu- 
lations a>»<: ordinances, designed to keep alive and incorporate in the 



21 



■affairs of the daily life the Divine Idea revealed in the command- 
meats, and render effective and active the law written in the heart of 
man, of which the commandments were a repetition and reflex ; this we 
have said before, but a contrary view would render Israel's revelation 
still more brilliant, still more Divine, if that were possible. But " man 
is not bad from the beginning-.'' Consider, too, the nature of this peo- 
ple, although chosen, what influences had surrounded them, recent 
slaves of a people who had themselves lost the best ideas of their an- 
cestors, and who had sunk to the lowest depths of turpitude, practicing 
the most degrading rites, building magnificent temples to cats and cows„ 
Consider too, the religions and habits of the contemporary nations 
that Israel was to exterminate on account of the man-subverting wick* 
edness of those nations, as Moses said, and you can in a natural way 
imagine the importance of the consummation of such an object; and, 
bearing in mind the comparative ignorance and hardness of the masses 
of the chosen race, necessary adjuncts of the environment already 
alluded to, no one will fail to perceive the necessity for just such pen- 
alties and punishments, as were prescribed in the Mosaic code. For 
just such enactments that calls forth Mr. Ingersoll's virulent abuse of 
Jehovah, and a code full of tenderness and love to man. Let us state 
while on this subject, that these penalties, around which Holy Writ' s 
line of mercy was drawn, were the beginning of an education, a school 
that was to evolve this code confirmatory sentiment and prediction of 
the 4 rapt, seraphic " Isaiah, emphasized and reaffirmed by Christ, who, 
Mr. Iugersoll says, was mistaken, but who is nevertheless pointing 
the way to Heaven, to those who will see, and hear, and understand. 

" The Wolf also shall dwell with the Lamb, and the Leopard shall 
lie down with the Kid, and the Calf and the young Lion, and the fat- 
ling together.and a little child shall lead them; and the Cow and Bear 
shall feed their young ones and lie down together ; and the Lion shall 
eat straw like the Ox, and the suckling child shall play on the hole of 
the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice's 
den. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, for the 
earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the 
sea P Beautiful foreshadowing of the spirit of the coming Mes- 
sianic time! Until that time, I suppose, there will be those, who, 



22 



abusing the right of the free thought they claim, confessing to the 
possession of a faculty, which renders man not altogether an automa- 
ton, a fact that renders clear, the universal human necessity for deter- 
ring penalties and punishments according to time and circumstance, 
penalties that lift and preserve society from deeper anarchy as evidenced 
by existing penal laws ; I suppose there will be those who will continue 
to abuse, to arraign and impeach the Jehovah of the Jews, " Jehovah. 
Jehovah God ! Merciful and gracious, long suffering and abundant of 
goodness and truth, and keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity 
and transgression and sin. Who by his strength setteth fast the 
mountains being girded with power ; who hath laid the foun- 
dation of the earth, and the heavens, are the work of His hands." 
"They shall perish but he shall endure." Yea, all of them shall wax 
old like a garment, and as a vesture shall he change them, and they 
shall be changed, but he is the same, and his years shall have no end," 
for he inhabiteth eternity and the praises thereof. Israel's sublime 
conception of the infinite " power, not ourselves!" 

Ail the arguments and considerations that I have offered in de- 
fence of a literal application of the Mosaic peualty — attached to a vio- 
lation of the Sabbath, though I ask attention to the mercy that animated 
the whole t Mosaic dispensation, and which resulted, as I have already 
shown, by reference to authorities, in its severer penalties beingscarcely 
ever inflicted, apply with a thousand times more force to Idolatry, the 
suppression of which was striking at the root of the evil indeed. There 
is nothing insisted on in the Pentateuch with more emphasis, and allu- 
ded to more frequently, than the terrible harmfulness of Idolatry. It is 
the crime of crimes, to ignore the one true God of nature, the Father of all 
and bow down to wood and stone, to fire,to cat and cow,to devils,and even 
to sun, moon and stars. Think of the worship of Moloch, to whom 
children were thrown by the hundreds to the fire to be burnt. Ah, 
how do devils find a devil in God ? Think of Chemung, Astarte, Da- 
gon, &c. &c, and all of the horrid revolting rites and practices that 
constituted the worship of some of these Gods, and every sane man, 
must admit that the march of the Israelitish armies was inspired by the 
goodness of Jehovah, that the wars that Israel waged were ivaged in mer- 
cy to mankind, when it wiped out the Canaanitesand the other nations 



23 



and tribes surrounding Palestine; nations " spewed out by the land " 
nations with their prattling babes, seed and root of babbling and 
wicked adu.ts. "If you will go with me in rebellion I will go with 
you in violence of rebellion." — Leviticus. "Obey the law of love and 
live, abandon yourselves outside of this law and perish.'' 

Consider the advantage in the destruction, at least in port, of an 
all blasting source, from which a deadly virus was estopped from circu- 
lating in the veins of man, and the affirmation of Holy Writ, that " in 
the destruction of the wicked there is joy," has from a comprehensive 
standpoint, a verifiable significance. Moses in tnis connection gave the 
following reason for these wars, that Mr. Ingersoli calls wars of con- 
quest: Deuteronomy — ix. I and 5. "Speak not thou in thy heart, 
after that the Lord thy God hath cast them out from before thee, say- 
ing, For my righteousness the Lord hath brought me in to possess this 
land ; but for the wickedness of these nations the Lord doth drive them 
out from before thee. Not for thy righteousness, or for the upright- 
ness of thine heart, dost thou go to possess their lands ; but for the 
wickedness of these nations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from 
before thee." 

If it w r ere not for transactions like these, would Mr Ingersoli have a 
market to-day to dispose of his idea of goodness, puerile and unintel- 
ligent as it is, to an unthinking throng? As a man cannot love the 
good and at the same time hate the rooting out of the evil, which is it 
that Mr. Ingersoli loves so rhetorically? Ah the Ariadne clue to the 
existence of the things some people complain of as wrong or evil in 
the Bible, is that the universal good is being always sought, that " acts 
have consequences," that goodness must prevail and conquer and that 
wickedness must suffer and die. What good man would reverse this 
and have evil and all its pangs be eternal, be fostered and encouraged ? 
Let us ahvays remember that the Bible says, thai man, outside of the 
Divine covenant, is always in danger, and so, Justice and Mercy, voices 
of Jehovah based on man's nature, are always at work, to bring him to 
his highest self. "If," as a certain Rabbi says, "the laws of nature 
went on bv their own immutable force however much evil might 
spring therefrom," until the Creator should bring things to some 
round turn indicated in the Bible, and which, revelation's aim is to 



24 



manifest and to assist man in moulding, we can comprehend what the 
Haggadah means, when it says, in reference to the propagation of the 
evil doers and their kin, "bearing the human face Divine," "these wicked 
ones not only vulgarise my coin, but they actually make me impress 
base coin with my own stamp, and we have one more argument for 
Israel's destruction of the wicked/' No I these wars that Israel waged 
were not altogether wars of conquest. "And the land," of the nations 
conquered, (Moses, speaking for the Divine Intelligence), ''And the land 
is defiled, therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land 
itself vomiteth out her inhabitants." 

After enumerating the abeminations that the men of the land com- 
mitted (See Leviticus, xviii) Moses cautions Israel against them in 
this wise ; " That the land spew not you out also, when ye defile it, as it 
spewed out the nations that were before you." 

What a chapter could be written on the effects of the pernicious 
customs of these nations, and then how easy it would be for the most 
sceptical and inane to admire the justice and benevolence of Israel's 
Jehovah, instead of abusing and deriding him, as the unlearned, unin- 
structed and faithless do. 

Ah, believe in Israel's Jehovah or not ! Believe in or favor the hy- 
pothesis of a self existent universe, or not, who is this Israel that puts 
out the hand to avert the beastialization, the utter, unimaginable horror 9 
agony and savagery of mankind ? You say she was not inspired, well, 
if these are the mere manifestations of intellect in a few individuals, it 
will not be surprizing, es mankind learns more and more of the Divine 
Idea, plan, philosophy and design of the Bible, to find men bowing 
down to these individuals as to Gods. 

What a move for a few escaped slaves from Egypt to determine to 
punish and succeed in destroying the national life of a maximum deg- 
radation and wickedness ! Or, on the other hand, having regard, for 
the sake of argument, to the hypothesis of a self existent universe that 
Mr. Ingersoll favors, what an admirable, consoling, brilliant aspect and 
evolution of this self existent man; denizen of a self existent uni- 
verse; to resist and destroy a destructive evil, to elicit, demand and es- 
tablish the good for man ? Let those who whine over the evil that 



25 



man produces in the abuse of thought and action, be thankful at least 
for the good that inheres in the universe, and for its manifestati mi by 
a few Jews. 

With regard to slavery as it existed among the Jews, it cannot be 
called slavery when compared with Roman slavery, and other ancient 
and even modern forms of slavery. It was a bond servantism limited 
to seven years. These laborers by contract or bond, married in the 
families of employers, and were on an equal political and social foot- 
ing, protected by the economic institutions of the Jubilee, the special, 
tender regulation governing the system in the laws of the Pentateuch, 
and the spirit of the religion which insists so much on the bond of in- 
terdependence between man and man that should be recognized in 
love; that insists so much on loving one's neighbor as one's self. If 
there was anything painful in it, it was against the spirit of the relig- 
ion, of that religion and those institutions that were calculated in con 
fortuity with certain laws to lead gradually to that time when King 
Solomon boasted that " there was not a slave in Israel," Says the Tal- 
mud, u Scripture ordains tint the Hebrew who loves his bondage (even 
that kind of mild bondage, a necessary condition iu the gradual devel- 
opement of a social constitution that was t;i be perfect, right, Messia- 
nic,) shall have his ear pierced against the door post." Why? Be- 
cause it is that ear which heard on Sinai: " They are my servants, not 
servants of servants." and this man voluntarily throws away his precious 
freedom ! Pierce his ear !*' 

The following quotations from the Pentateuch indicate exactly 
what kind of slavery was this Hebrew bond servantism, and illustrates 
beautifully and forcefully the tender justice, mercy, and liberality which 
governed an institution, that mild as it was in its nature, must be re- 
garded only as a phase in Uie development of the national life, and 
was one of the incidents owing their existence to the absence of the 
entire incorporation and execution of the Divine Idea or spirit of 
their covenant, which tends to the most perfect social conditions and 
relations of individual and aggregate human life. The object of all 
the legislation of the Pentateuch, was to bring Israel mercifully and 
gradually to the adoption of the higher law of the covenant. 



26 



"And if thy brother that dwelleth by thee be waxen poor, and be 
sold unto thee, thou shalt not compel him to serve as a bond servant ; 
but as a hired servant, and a sojourner, he shall be with thee, and shall 
serve thee unto the year of jubilee : And then shall he depart from 
thee, both he and his children with him, and shall return to his own 
family, and unto the possessions of his fathers shall he return. For 
they are my servants, which I brought forth out of the land of Egypt : 
they shall not be sold as bondmen. Thou shalt not rule over him 
with rigor, but shalt fear thy God." 

Again we find a similar provision in Deuteronomy, — xv. 12, 13 and 
14. "And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold 
unto thee, and serve thee six years, then in the seventh year thou shalt 
let him go free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty : Thou 
shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and 
out of thy wine press : of that wherewith the Lord thy God hath 
blessed thee, thou shalt give unto him." 

But slavery has a history which is not yet written, and the origin 
of all forms of slavery will be found in a state of society where man is 
not in accord with the good God — where he is not following the com- 
mand to love his neighbor as himself. Moses knew, what Mr. Inger- 
soll does not appear to know, that certain conditions had to be met, 
until the Divine leaven of the revelation of Israel had done its work, 
and he treated them both from the side of mercy, and the side of hu- 
man weasness It was not Jehovah permitting, so much as Jehovah 
calling back non-automatic man who had abused his power. This 
view disposes of Mr. Ingersoll's arraignment of Jehovah on the slavery 
question, when it is carefully considered. Ah, malign not, accuse not 
of cruelty that fearful and glorious name, the Lord thy God ! in awful 
ignorance of its dread, mysterious and eternal potency. Why can you 
not comprehend this Divine Intelligence? I plead for man, that his 
faith be not struck, and his light waver not ; the glory of Israel's voice 
is. that it is for man, and it is all that he has. Let us remember that 
Moses at the induction of the people in the covenant of righteousness 
between God and man, told them this : " Neither with you only do I 
make this covenant and this oath. But with him, (the stranger) that 
standeth here with us this day before the Lord our God, and also with 
him that is not here with us this day." 



27 



With regard to Polygamy, the command, "Thou shalt not com. 
mit adultery !" went forth against it, and it would be well for the race 
if it were more generally obeyed, and a far worse form of polygamy 
than the Hebrew patriarchial one, a base type that goes under another 
name, could be extirpated with its woful physiological consequences 
from the social body. There are reasons, in the traditions, for the 
exceptional instances in which heads of families, at a certain period in 
Jewish history, permitted themselves one or more concubines, recog- 
nized by the mother and wife of the household ; a sacred central fig- 
ure in Israel, for objects that were to subserve the highest interests of 
the race, a discussion of which, is not necessary here. 

But the real fact is, that the general aspect of polygamy, like the 
mild form of bond servantism or slavery, that existed, brings to mind 
the difference between the spirit of the revelation of the Divine Idea, 
and laws taking in consideration the habits, customs aud environment of 
the Jewish people and the age they lived in; which, it was the design of 
the covenant or decalogue to reform, or mould into conditions in har- 
mony with its precepts. How would it do to-day to enforce the teach- 
ings of Moses and Christ on the money question ? Nevertheless, when 
the gist, the esseuce of the Hebrew truth comes to be apprehended, it 
might not be found so difficult. Let us state, at the risk of what may be 
regarded as a tedious repetition, what it is absolutely necessary to 
understand in order to account for certain things in the Pentateuch, 
which may apparently be in conflict with the Divine Idea ; that such 
is the constitution of man, that no mere commandment will reach 
him : that the whole object of the Scriptural Revelation is to enable 
him as it were, to come back to the place he belongs to in 
nature. He would not be man if Jehovah would but will as he willed 
the physical light, what man should alwa,ys be, and do nolens volens. 
There is a difference between the conditions proceeding from right 
acting in accord with the Divine Idea of the Bible, and per se, the re- 
verse. The statutes and laws in the Bible that take cognizance of this 
reversed condition of things, must not be understood as Jehovah's pri- 
mal y endorsation of them, but these laws are designed to gradually, 
under certain well known general laws inherent in the present condi- 
tion of things, bring man to the comprehension and performance of 



28' 



those high duties that lead to the happiness which follows right doing 
here, and prepares him to enter (believe it or not) into the " unspeaka- 
ble joys that ear has not heard, eye has not seen.'' Let us not forget 
that it takes but a moment to rise to the spirit of the Divine law, clear- 
ing at a bound the human foil, to be lifted to, to enter in accord with the 
highest; to acquire a power that means wonderful things. 
The Good, the Good, the Bible says lives forever: it is the evil that per- 
ishes. Christianity is the religion of goodness, pure and simple. There 
is no deadly venom in it, as Mr, Ingersoll says there is. The deadly 
venom is somewhere else, outside of it. What is venomous and un- 
christian, is slander, envy, vanity, rapacity and all the degrading 
lapses that ultimate in robbery, and muifder— agony. 

While on the subject of Polygamy, I am reminded of something 
like a Quixotic defence of woman, implying an attack on her status in 
the Israel of Biblical times, by Mr. Ingersoll, which a knowledge of 
the subject as presented in the Bible would have rendered impossible. 
I shall not refer here to the Women of Israel as the Bible presents 
them as all Bible students are familiar with their exalted record. 
Let me quote something from the contemporary Biblical record, from 
the dicta of ^iie Hebrew masters of the law in reference to the status of 
woman, the complement of man. The Talmud says, " Love your wife 
like yourself; honor her more thin yourself. Whoever lives unmarried ■ 
lives without joy, without comfort, without blessing. Descend a step 
in choosing a wife. If thy wife is small, bend dowD to her and whis- 
per in. her ear. He who forsakes the love of his youth, God's altar 
weeps for him. He who sees his wife die before him, has, as it were, 
been present at the destruction of the sanctuary itself ; around him 
the world grows dark. It is woman alone through whom God's bless, 
ings are vouchsafed to a house. She teaches the children; speeds the 
husband to the place of worship and instruction ; welcomes ham when 
he returns; keeps the house Godly and pure, and God's blessings (that 
God Mr. Ingersoll says is unjust and wicked,) rests upon all these 
things."" tfvtf! •' ■ 

Now let us turn our attention to Epictetus. Cicero, Zoroaster, : 
Budha, and all the other philosophers and the Koran, quoted 
by Mr. Ingersoll, ostensibly to create the impression that they 



29 



too possess the Divine Idea of the Bible; while the truth is, they 
have only given expression to some of the thoughts of the Book, and 
in those instances, where the monotheistic idea has been seized to a 
certain degree, it will all be found directly traceable to the very inspir- 
ing source that it is attempted to belittle, and whose wide influence 
and nature requires a certain degree of culture and ability to justly 
apprehend and justly estimate 

What ! Epictetus, who lived two hundred and fifty years after 
Christ, and five hundred years after the Bible had been translated in 
Greece, who obtained, as the others quoted did, the sentiments and ideas 
he is credited with, from the religion of the Jews ! The slave Epictetus, 
(whose leg was broken by his master) neither he nor his followers would 
have had called into requisition one of the tenets of their stoical philoso- 
phy(that of training one's self to endure suffering which was regarded as 
a necessity) if the race they belonged to had comprehended and adopted 
the Divine commands and teachings contained in the Bible, which 
makes for universal happiness and freedom from pain based on uni- 
versal goodness. It will not do to quote as an offset or pit against the 
Bible Epictetus, Cicero, Plato, or any of the stoics, who all lived after 
the Boole was translated into the Greek lano-uage. Other facts in con- 
nection with the more than probability that the morality and anti- 
Pagan ideas of heathen philosophers are derived from the religion of 
the Jews are, the circumstances of the histories of Rome and Greece, 
which bring these nations in close and frequent contact with Judea ; 
the familiarity of the Jews with the Greek and Latin languages, as 
evidenced by the Talmud and other philological indications in connec- 
tion with chronology and history. It is quite pertinent to ask those 
who quote philosophers propagating ideas foreign to, and differing 
radically with prevailing systems of belief, in view also of facts al- 
ready alluded to, to disprove that these philosophers were nourished, 
instructed and inspired by the influences of the world's spiritual alma 
mater, that store-house and unique repository of the principal saving 
and staying id. as of mankind, the Hebrew T Bible. Cicero is said to 
have possessed in a remarkable degree the literary talent of rendering 
the ideas of others in choice and attractive language. A man of no 
originality, who can say what he picked up in his excursions to Asia, 
and from Jews in Rome and Greece ? Philo- Judeas w T as a contempo- 



30 



rary of his, practicing law in Rome. Csecilius, a Jew, also practiced 
law in Cicero's early period of activity. The Jewish scribe's presence 
may have been a comparatively silent one in those countries, but they 
had the irresistible and commanding influence that belongs to superior 
ideas. Sir Albert Grant, in his Oxford essay, writes of the system of 
the Stoics (Socrates, Plato, Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Au- 
relius were followers of that system) that "almost all the first Stoics 
were of Asiatic birth, and the system itself is undeniably more akin to 
the Oriental mind than to the Greek." Posodonious, a Stoic, was ac- 
quainted with Marius and Porapey, and taught Cicero, but the moral 
treatise of Cicero's DeOfficiis was derived from a work of Panaetius, 
who was taught by Andpater of Tarsus. Two other philosophers are 
mentioned from the native province of St. Paul, besides Chrisyppus, 
Athenodorus from Cana, and Archedemus, from Tarsus, the Jewish 
apostle's birth place. And so Mr. Ingersoll's quotation from Cicero's 
DeOfficiis is derived from a work of Panaetius, a man suspected of 
being a Jew, and if not a Jew, deriving his ideas more than probably 
from Jews ! To the books ! to the testimony ! to the books ihafc writers 
of encyclopedic articles are acquainted with, and to those books that 
some of them are not acquainted with, and it will be found, perhaps, 
that credit has been withheld from Mount Zion and the Desert and 
given to babbling brooks that took their rise from them, and are even 
now uususpectedly meandering through the histories of the different 
nations. Why should their original source be ignored? But a rush- 
ing sciolism so often falls in amusing situations like thece. The 
exile that carried the Jew to Persia, with its religion of two distinct 
matures — one, a silly worship based on a dualism of assumed powers, 
and the other, recognizing the monotheistic principle, which is the 
basis of the true religion uf intelligence and aspiration — will account, 
on a thorough investigation of the subject, for any resemblances that 
may be found in Zoroastrianism to Judaism. The morality and ethics 
of the religion of Persia, if not wholly derived from Jews, is the off- 
spring of a belief in the unity of Gad, and is a logical deduction there- 
from. In this connection, it is to be borne in mind that it is recorded 
a Zaroastrian Priest went purposely to Palestine with the avowed ob- 
ject of obtaining ideas to reform the crude and immature beliefs and 
philosophers of Persia. 



31 



I have uot the space to enter into any extended discussion of what 
some call comparative religion. I have neither time nor opportunity* 
not having the necessary books of reference at hand to amplify this 
point, but, as I have already said, the existence of ever so little light 
outside of the Bible is not an argument against its divine excellence 
and perfection. It is quite fair to remind those who are pitting (as 
they think) outside facts against Bible facts that they are engaged in a 
very comical and stultifying course, in thus unconsciously recognizing 
and appreciating the merits of the very original root and factor that 
they ignore. With regard to certain fine and delicate sentiments 
from Gotama Budha, quoted by Mr. I. as au offset to the Bible, let us 
remember the voyages toOphir from Judea aud surrounding countries, 
with their probable effects, and let us not be over hasty in attributing, 
with certainty, the origin of these fine sentiments to where it may not 
belong. 

But a certain writer has said truly, that on the whole the religion of 
Budha is the religion of a mad house, and assurredly no thinker or 
scholar need he told that any comparison between the religion of the Bi- 
ble and the religion of Budha. with its crude, stultifying, Ingersollistic 
aspect of annihilation as a boon and the goal to be desired, would 
be idle, unnecessary and a mere work of supererogation. And so 
with regard to the Koran, quoted by the learned gentleman as pos- 
sessing sentiments equal to the Bible in beauty and elevation ; the 
Koran, which is a record "of the religion of Abraham adapted to 
Arabia?" What! the Koran, that any man with the slightest degree 
of learning, and of what may be called the literary sense, cannot fail 
to trace to the Hebrew scriptures as its original pattern ! The Koran, 
that tells its followers to turn to Jerusalem in their prayers and to 
follow the religion of Abraham, and which contains so many allusions 
and so many points of resemblance to J udaism and the Book, that it 
almost amounts tD a literal and huge literary plagiarism ! But there 
is consolation in the thought that the Koran is the record of a rela- 
tively progressive movement, whose value consists in the fact that it 
inoculated idolatrous and comparatively barbarous people with a little 
of the leaven of the Divine Idea of Israel. Who can tell how much 



82 



easier in time for developments like these will be the spiritual fusion 
and solidarity of all the races of mankind into one sane, righteous na- 
tion, with the Jehovah of the Jews, the God of Nature, as the one only 
sovereign — true head of the universal nation, humanity — achieving 
that unspeakable happiness which is man's right and destiny, and 
whiclr]he has forfeited through a siuful and gross unintellectuality, and 
which it is the mission of the revelation to Israel to minister to and 
remedy. 

Because Christ cries out "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" 
Mr.- Ingersoll says Christ was mistaken. The apotheosis and fruition 
of Hebrew prophecy, the incarnation of the Divine Idea of the Bible 
mistaken ! Perhaps the gentleman is mistaken ; perhaps he has never 
read the 22d Psalm. Let any man read it attentively and he will 
find by the context the meaning of the Psalm, that meaning which the 
first line that is only given by Mr, I. as quoted by Cftrist does not convey. 
Might He not have repeated the whole composition, if not viva voce 
certainly to himself? He was seized by the spirit of David's prayer, 
which was most appropriate, not only to the occasion but to all the 
circumstances of his career — his trial, his experience, his effort. Let 
me quote a few verses which suggest better the meaning of 31 verses 
of the entire Psalm than the first line of a composition saturated with 
faith and tnist in Jehovah and his greatness, with the knowledge that 
suffering must be borne from the ignorant, who are to be lifted up to a 
God whose stage is boundless space, whose time is eternity and whose 
resources are inexhaustible. This, though, is not the place or inspir- 
ing occasion to dwell on the indicated knowledge and nature of the 
great Hebrew whose mysterious and profound personality towers over 
and above the Disciples and Apostle? who reported him. These are 
the verses I would quote immediately following the line quoted by 
Christ on the cross, and which reveal the signification and the sense 
in which he used it : 

'■My God ! My God ! Why hast thou forsaken rria ? Why art thou 
so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring. 

" Our fathers trusted in thee , they trusted and thou didst deliver 
them. 



33 



"They cried unto thee, and were delivered; they trusted in thee 
and were not confounded. 

"But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised 
of the people. 

"All they that see me laugh me to scorn ; they shoot out the lip, 
they shake the head, saying, 

" ' He trusted on the Lord that he would deliver him ; let him de- 
liver him, seeing he delighteth in him.' 

" Be not far from me; for trouble is near ; for there is none to help. 

"I am poured out like water, and all my bones are ou-t of joint; mv 
heart is like wax. 

"My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue cleaveth 
to my jaws, and thou hast fought me unto the death of deaths. 

"The assembly of the wicked have enclosed me; they pierced my 
hands and my feet. 

" They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my 
vesture. 

" Be thou not far from me, O Lord, O my strength, haste thee to 
help me. 

" For the Kingdom is the Lord's: and he is the governor among 
the nations. 

" They shall come, and shall declare his righteousness unto a peo- 
ple that shall be born, he hath done this." 

He wanted to give a lesson of faith to the bitter human end, faith 
in his mission and hope in his immortality w 7 hen he quoted this Psalm. 
In view of his immediate sufferings he must have dwelt on this verse : 
" They parted my garments among them, and cast lots upon my 
vesture." 

Notice in most of Israel's prayers the human element of doubt in in- 
dividual relief stated, but always quickly overborne by the triumphant 
proposition of faith in a righteous God to the end. Aye, the struggle 
that commenced the night at Penuel is not yet ended. Israel still 
struggles and her work still goes on; her destiny is not yet complete. 

Mistaken writer of the "civilized living" bow to those you call 
" barbarian dead ;" acknowledge your mistake "like a man," and in all 
calmness and reverence try to understand this mysterious and wonder- 
ful counsellor, this incarnate, surpassing intelligence and goodness, 



34 



far beyond your grasp of conception, but yet for all that your friend, 
mankind's friend and lover, whose exact relation to Jehovah, man may 
never thoroughly compass, but whose mercy, infinite love, intelligence 
and goodness nearer to man than the awfully great incomparable 
and incomprehensible, but living God, Jehovah, will always constrain 
thinking and awakened humanity. 

Because Christ speaks of what he knows of another existence and 
cf the unrepentant spirit's remorse and self condemnation at a 
certain juncture, he is accused of" coiling a deadly venom in his teach- 
ings ; " he gives information to a non-automatic being to a degree, calls 
upon him to repent and be happy, he deals in truth as hy knew it 
and he whose value as a factor in keeping man from sinking can hardly 
be overestimated is accused of a hatred and venora that manifests 
itself in what Mr. Ingersoll calls a threat of "dungeons of eternal 
pain," a phrase of Mr. IngersolTs born of unreason and an artificial 
rhetoric. 

Because Christ warns man that there is a magical power behind 
him able to bring back to life the very germs, the gnats ; able to carry 
conscious man, being, through an eternity of changes to inconceivable 
destinies, having power to compensate suffering and punish culpa- 
bility; having ends beyond human apprehension and realization; be- 
cause he tells man to love, and loving know, and knowing co-operate 
in the evolution of the kingdom of universal happiness — a kingdom that 
shall b"j through the will of Jehovah, the author of life and death, he 
who conserves his creation, the illimitable and miraculous universe, 
because Christ affirms and emphasizes this, in Mr. Ingersoll's words, 
k ' there lies coiled a deadly venom in Christ's teachings." 

Facts like these ought not to fall with much surprise on the ears of 
doubters and of people generally, and of scientists and philosophers 
who believe that the universe sprung from nothing, or from something 
next to nothing, say an atom, with Aristotle and others, 
or nebulae, or sea-ooze, or in Spencerian earth-creating showers 
of star dust, ought not, taking in reasonable consideration 
what these origins have accomplished in time up to now, in evolving 
the grand universe, I say, then, that given eternal time what is there 
surprising that there should inhere, even in a self-existent universe, 
leaving Jehovah alone for a moment and conceding for a moment the 



35 

self existent universe hypothesis Mr. Ingersoll favors, what is there 
surprising in a resurrection of some to endless bliss, some to 
long enduring but not endless pain? I submit by way of suggestion 
and argument merely that this subject arithmetically viewed in a rule 
of three form yields a product ideally distancing even such a 
resurrection. While time endures humanity will love to dwell on 
and derive strength from the record of the spectacle of the great Jew 
yielding his physical life to Jehovah for Jehovah, and to man for man, 
calling Jews,and with them man kind, to that introspection which reveals 
that aspect of the Hebrew truth which defines man's true relation to 
Jehovah and the infinite possibilities of that subtle thing which we call 
human life. Let this opponent of the Jehovah of the Jews and the 
universe cease pandering to a degradation, with all its painful and 
unpoetical accompaniments, and which, conscious of its guilt, instinct- 
ively scouts the idea of a hell. Mistaken Christ ! Infallible Inger- 
soll ! Eternal power ! Behold the Jew Christ, dying for man, ccrtes, 
iir a certain incontrovertible sense, and Ingersoll calling on man to 
move on the throne of the Invisible Power and perish in agony! 

The religion of the Bible is love ; all rational deductions from its 
teachings lead to this conclusion. "Search the scriptures ;" read, ponder 
and find the guiding hand of Israel tlvdtstays, that will be even then put 
out towards the derider and mocker of Jehovah to waive him back and 
deter others from following in his wake, that they go not down will- 
fully, with spray blinded eves into the darkness that is darker than the 
depths of all the seas that lie couched by the earth as they were put by 
the mighty and terrible, yet merciful and much enduring holy one of 
Israel. The writer of the articles referred to derides the Jehovah of 
the Bible, derides distinctly nature and its God, questions and de- 
rides His justice, let us satisfy ourselves with but a- passing allusion to 
these impossible and grotesque propositions. Israels Jehovah is her 
conception and recognition of the awfully great, infinite, eternal, 
creative, all-producing power, which conscious thinking and awakened 
man realizes outside of himself, outside of Nature. Touching him, touch- 
in<r it, in its own perfect and incomprehensible way, we repeat, in an 
unconscious inscrutable immanency: and Israel discovering her in- 
tellect is touched by Jehovah's angel, the Divine Intelligence, "her 
Lord, her God," Jehovah's voice to man, the inspirer of pbrazes like 



36 



' 'Thus saith the Lord thy God;" "And the Lord said unto Moses." 
It is under this influence that Israel sees visions, hears voices, dreams 
dreams, and feels the burning truths that have been communicated to 
her, and which she holds for maukind, to mould and assist the many. 
This is the imperative genius of the Bible, through which Israel is 
telling her story even now to the nations, even to the ignorant, who 
mock and jibe, if haply they may yet understand her solemn, potent, 
and vital revelation ; but let me constrain my pen, for there is 
latent in Bible truth, t that which may yet startle the nations 
into horror at growing and inexcusable impiety and perversion. 

There is a power inherent in the truths of Israel's communication 
to humanity that can yet again raise the equivalent of invincible ar- 
mies for Nature's Jehovah, as in times of old, to destroy the wicked- 
ness'that would destroy goodness, that goodness, that happiness which is 
man's right, and is Israel's mission to aid him in securing, and which 
may be imperilled if men should be led in masses to imagine that God 
is not just, that Christ is mistaken, that deductively man need not be 
just to man, to himself, that at the best, there is nothing to be found or 
be sought but compliance with conditions that are rendered necessary 
in the acquisition and conservation of fine houses and sensual things 
generally "Woe unto them who build house against house and cry 
peace when there is no peace. Woe unto them that comfort not the 
fatherless, the orphan, the widow, the poor of my people, who will not 
do judgment." Judgment, judgment! this last so frequently, so 
urgently insisted on in the Book that Mr. I. calls " a barrier and 
impediment to the progress and civilization of mankind," and who says 
that "the justice of God is not visible in the history of the world." 
Ah, Jehovah God is just after all! he insists so much on judgment, 
justice, mercy from man to man, for man so interdependent upon man, 
for man so inextricably bonded to man. How quick would non- 
automatic man, who is called upon to act, perceive that " the justice 
of God is visible in the history of the world" if man would be just to 
himself, to man ! Let this argument or presentation of a fact silence 
forever the declaration that " the justice of God is not visible in the his- 
tory of the world." Take the Bible word for it that the storm, the 
pestilence, the animals preying upon animals and the ''stink instead of 



37 



the sweet odor" is a harmonious correspondence Dot devoid of its mercy 
side, responding to the rapacity, cruelty, sensuality .egotism of alienated 
self- forfeiting, unthinking mortal, who is being lifted while he attends 
to the law in his breast; who is being called by Jehovah's messengers, 
the prophets of Israel, to awake from his lethargy and take his proper 
place of happiness in nature. Let men listen to those Mr. [ngersoll 
calls " barbarian dead ; " " the civilized living," as he vain-gloriously 
calls the living, have no light of themselves only so far as they are 
leavened with the leaven of Israel's revelation, the whole burden of which 
is, that man must restrain himself; that he alone in his immediate 
sphere attains consciousness, attaining which, it behooves him to build 
for himself a spiritual life enfolded in a tabernacle of goodness, and 
consulting himself his Father's servant, minister to his fellow man, 
extending his charity to the dumb animals, aye, "breaking not a bruised 
reed, quenching not burning flax ;" replacing pain with pleasure, sor- 
row with joy. Through the roll of centuries upon centuries I hear the 
echo of the words in the question that the Divine Hebrew peasant put 
to the ecclesiastical authorities that had lapsed from the spirit of 
their religion and their charge, " Why will ye not understand ?" And 
one feels tempted to put it here, and in this moment, to those who 
would seem to have wandered so far, so far from the light of heaven. 

Man who arr ugns Jehovah for the suffering that springs from the 
things he doc*, and the things he endorses, which is doing also ; man 
who misses his life and fails in the end to rob physical death of its 
sting and the grave of its victory, thinking like Mr. Ingersoll, ar- 
raigns Jehovah for letting him be mau, and not a mere machine, not 
an animal with fixed and circumscribed and special capacities to carry 
out ends in the physical economy of man's habitation. And do wq 
know all of animals ? He who taunts and flings back in Jehovah's 
face his existence and the existence of the innumerable myriads of 
beings of the past, the present and the future, what is it that keeps 
him from suicide ? Is it the pleasures of a derided existence, or is it 
the fear that all does not end in the grave ; the fear that he is in the 
hands of a power whose mandates, purposes and will are as irresistible 
irreversible and unchangeable as the laws of nature, so called, is 
Israel's recommended fear of her Lord based on his or its greatness 



38 



and goodness, a goodness that the individual must have a share iu 
creating, eliciting, meriting, is not that righteous fear the most sane, 
the most rational, the most hopeful and staying fear ? And this is 
the fear and faith that the unthinking, uninstructed and faithless would 
attempt to belittle and gainsay. 

We have in mind Mr. Ingersoll's arraignment of creation and auda- 
cious criticism of the Jews, aud we say that the sanity of Israel , even 
from an ordinary standpoint, must be recognized and admired when it 
is remembered that she never asked why we or the universe was created f 
A man mav ask one about the theory of the computations of the dis- 
tances of the heavenly bodies aud not be able to receive the informa- 
tion from lack of special knowledge and training. Does something 
like this not suggest the futility of endeavoring to obtain an exact and 
satisfactory answer to questions implied frequently in writings that 
impeach the justice of God, the fitness and existence of nature and the 
greatness of the universe? The revelation of the Bible is not to tell 
why we are made, and how or why anything is made, as much as it is to 
guide men how to live, how to get the most and best out of life. It 
tells of things surpassingly important, things within the scope of the 
human intellect. But I suppose the world would not object to infor- 
mation with regard to the origin and end of creation and purposes of 
the Creator other than the information contained in the Bible, which 
is much more ample than is generally supposed , and which is not more 
definite for obvious reasons already alluded to. 

When the opponent and critic of " the Jehovah of the Jews " and 
this vast illimitbale creation discovers somthing new then would be the 
right time to tear down, to destroy and to build, would it not? How 
would it do because certain people cannot see the justice of their suffer- 
ing for these to flock to the standard of Jehovah's opponent, whose 
writings may be but the preliminary bugle blasts to call sorely in- 
jured innocents, men and angels to arms ! Of course, cela va sans dire, 
the bulk of the American people, by the grace of God, will avoid the 
coming recruiting officer, but Jet us for a moment imagine the grand 
army organized and equipped, on which work or p >sition in nature 
would the first onset be made? Not on the wickedness of man would 
these angels move; they would probably send out a large force to de- 



39 



stroy and exterminate all the animals that live on the " quivering 
agonies" of each other; these angels who themselves never lusted after 
flesh, but were always content with the mana from heaven and the herbs 
of the field; they never felled an ox or deer, or strangled a chicken, or 
trapped a bird, or baited any of the finny tribe. But I 
suppose the leaders of this new party will not limit themselves to 
issuing mere bulls against the things they do not comprehend, but 
confounding all things they will march on every tangible manifesta- 
tion of nature separately and in detail. They will not commence their 
war with an attack on the stars, considering their immense distance 
and present inadequate and inconvenient methods of serial locomotion, 
and many will thank Jehovah for this, for are not those gilded orna- 
ments of the Heavenly Dome, the ever beautiful starry skies, the ever 
unhackneyed inspiring manuscript of God a relief and a delight to the 
vision of many? But I think I hear their angry cry, "To the ocean 
to the ocean !" remembering that she does not always bear every sail 
safely over her bosom, and forgetting that it is the wind, the wind, 
that ruffles the seas, and sometimes the weakness aud cupidity of man 
that damages the ship ; and perhaps instinctively avoiding the wind 
as rather too difficult to locate and have effective access thereto with 
their present rather limited resources they turn to attack the ocean as 
one of the principal tangible important works of Jehovah. 

Brave men ! we see them stripping for the fray ; they are marching 
on with stern and resolute but slightly pallid faces to lay their hands 
on ocean's mane and shake her till exhausted she surrenders and van- 
ishes into thin air. Yes, they are marching on the seas : they will go 
down, down to the depths, but the ocean will roll on. 



ERRATA. 



Page 6, 14th line — after the word death should be added. 
" — death in a spiritual sense ; death of the highest." 

.Page 9, 10th line — assailed should be assailed. 

Page 10, 1st line — Hature should be Nature. 

Page 18, 3d line from bottom — After word rested should be 
added, until some new special involution. 

Page 19, 3d line — -ifter the words he gave, insert transcend- 
ent importance. 

Page 24, 1st line, 2d paragraph — aberminations should be 
abominations. 

Page 30, last line — Philosophers should he philosophies' 
Page 38, 2d line, 2d paragraph — illimitabale should be 
illimitable. 



